Our December Sun Is Setting
by SheikVanillaNinja
Summary: Songfic. "Brothers on a Hotel Bed" by Death Cab For Cutie. Contains Character Death. Nostalgia. An old man reflects on his past with the woman of his dreams. He thinks about the friends he has watched pass away and in turn wonders what she thinks of him now that his body no longer reflects the youth inside. He comes to terms with his fleeting memory and embraces her one last time.


((So. This song... This song popped up on my music playlist today, and I just... Fell in love with it. I heard the lyrics and it got me in that little write-y mood thing, so I listened to it a few more times then popped this little baby out.  
It's not the best... I've never written for this pairing before and I wrote this whole thing in only a couple of hours.  
But it will be better if you listen to the song whilst reading it.  
(:

{"Brothers on a Hotel Bed. Death Cab For Cutie."}

The elderly man slowly crept his way back into the bedroom of his home. He rocked back and forth as he walked, one foot placed precariously in front of the other, rickety bones creaking within his legs. He, of course, used the cane to walk at this point, but that could only assist him so much. He diffidently wasn't as fast moving as he had been fifty, sixty, seventy some years ago. Simple tasks were difficult for him now.  
He'd retired from his job ages ago, now. His frail hands could no longer grasp the tools properly, hold them steady.  
This was his home. As long as he was still with her.  
It hadn't always been. One upon a time, he lived high up in an apartment, one that overlooked the city and all of the dazzling lights. Those had been his stars. Everything that he had taken for granted before, mean everything now.  
In the little one story house at the edge of town.  
He barely even could go outside. Leaving the front lawn was too much of a task now, but he still enjoyed sitting out on the front porch of the house, in the chair, watching the people, children, play through the streets.  
He had never been capable of having children, at least not with her.  
But he didn't mind.  
He remembered they days when he was one of those children, a teenage boy loitering around town afterschool with three other boys his age. He had been the quirky one, the shortest and the one that was generally poked fun at. But they still had welcomed him.  
Not a single one had been accepted by anyone else.

What had happened to them? His friends?  
He was the only one left now.  
Some of the losses were more painful for him to remember than others.

**You may tire of me as our December sun is setting because I'm not who I used to be**

Kyohei...  
Kyohei had passed away easily. His wife had been lying right beside him. He'd always been the calmest, most level-headed of the group. There wasn't really anything that had caused him to pass. He'd grown older, older, older, until one day his body slid in between the mattress and sheets a last time, and somewhere within the man's slumber his heart had finally brought itself to a halt. He closed his eyes peacefully, and there wasn't any sort of regrets for the man, either. Kyohei had been truly ready for death, and when it finally lifted him out of the constant he had not a word of protest.  
This had only been a few years prior. Every once in a while his friend's memory tugged some on the strings of his heart, but it was all bittersweet knowing that the man was at peace and had embraced his death.

No, it was when he thought about the other two, that his aging heart ached and clenched within his chest.

**No longer easy on the eyes but these wrinkles masterfully disguise**

Shizuo...  
The man had taken his death into his own hands. He couldn't understand why the old bodyguard had just kept on poisoning himself, taking the chemicals and smog into his body like it was his oxygen, and the pure air around him was what he would choke on. Shizuo had made his own decision, even if no one really knew why, no one could stop him from what he had decided was his comfort.  
Had Shizuo perhaps thought better of these things, he would have perhaps been sitting out there on the porch with him yesterday, with her as well, the two of them laughing at the nostalgia while she just watched over them with all of her heart.  
Perhaps Shizuo took the nicotine, subconsciously, in as a way to numb the feeling of being alone.  
After spending three, nearly four months in the hospital, fighting, fighting, the scourge of his cancer sapped away his last breath. It had been three days before the New Year, not too long would have followed the man's fifty-second birthday.

**The youthful boy below who turned your way and saw**

As for Izaya, well, this was a short little happening that he really wished would disappear from his mind.  
What exactly Izaya had done to the Awakusu-Kai that warranted what had happened he really never knew.  
But did it matter?  
Izaya had always been one who liked to skim over the rules. You could only poke a lion with a stick for so long before it turned around and spliced you open, allowing your guts to spill out onto the ground.  
It was his mistake, ultimately. He wasn't God, truly. Even if he had been in his mind, it didn't matter because he was only another faceless individual in the eyes of anyone else.  
The bullet through the back of his head had killed him instantly, he had been none the wiser of his impeding fate as he had walked back to his apartment from the Sushi shop that late October evening.  
Checkmate.

He was gone, just like that.

**Something he was not looking for; both a beginning and an end**

In order to give him time to grieve, the date of his and her wedding had been moved ahead another couple of months.  
Izaya had only been twenty-eight years old.

The severed head. The head. The head that young man had kept on the bookshelf in his office so far away from her grasp, the one he wanted him to keep from her...  
It was long gone now.  
It had been taken out of the country, overseas. Her missing piece, lost within the world when it had only just escaped her fingertips.  
And why did she not go after herself? Like the last time...?  
He just had to look into the mirror.

She was so selfless, and he was so greedy.  
She'd stayed with him.

She'd stayed with him despite how badly she wanted to be whole again.  
Whether it had been truly out of love, or out of pity.

She'd stayed.

The elderly man pressed his hand against the wallpaper of the home to steady himself, pausing for a short while on his journey to catch his fleeting breath. He suddenly felt very uneasy, like he was going to fall faint.

Her arms of course, wrapped around his waist comfortingly before his mind wandered any further.

**But now he lives inside someone he does not recognize**

"Ahhh... There you are, Celty..." His voice was raspy and worn, like ragged paper. "I was trying to find you..."  
The cell phone screen was held in front of him for communication, and he had to peer hard with his bifocal lenses to see what she had written.  
[ I wouldn't leave you, Shinra. You know that. ]  
He grinned weakly, chuckling, some of his laugh-lines and hanging skin parting like curtains to reveal a sweet smile full of crooked yellow teeth.

She pulls him a little bit closer, and he lets out a shaky sort of sigh and falls, leaning awkwardly against her, the cane dropping to the floor with a soft clatter.  
His gaze turns towards the ground, and his thin voice in whisper was nothing but a slight breeze through the air.  
"Celty... Tonight... Tonight I think you can start looking again."

She pauses, because by now and after all of this years, she knows what he means.  
The woman carefully pulled on his shoulders until he was facing her, she had to crouch just the slightest bit so that they were level. Her visor, the one the young, chipper brunette doctor had bought for her so long ago, to his worn, falling face as he remembers the day he gave it to her, whilst only able to face the image he cast into her visor.

**When he catches his reflection on accident**

He was so...  
This is what he had become? This is what she saw every day now?  
He was nothing but an frail old man while she remained exactly the same. Celty had not aged a day, not a second since his five year old self found her stowing away in the cargo of the boat him and his father were taking back home.  
She'd watched his entire life pass him by, and stood beside him the entire time.

Never once did she speak.  
Her siren's call was that of her soothing, solemn silence.

He pinched his lips together, then attempted to lift his arm up to her helmet. This was a risky, difficult business, and as he struggled, determined, she took his wrist in her hand and assisted him, youth everlasting within her who was thousands of years older than her himself. She brought his knuckles up to the side of her helmet, and slowly pushed the yellow mask off and exposed...  
He saw her face within that smoke. Her beautiful, gorgeous, striking face, dazzling beyond words. He could see it. Within the smoke, within her movements, her actions her words. Perhaps he was the only one who really could.  
"Ahh, kissed you...~ Heh..."

**On the back of a motor bike with your arms outstretched trying to take flight**

That was where he was that beautiful day. The summer before the first year of high school? Yes. When he had taken up all of his allowance, money earned by stitching ripped teddy bears and putting wraps of splints and gauze on cats' feet, he'd saved up enough to by her the beautiful helmet he'd been passing by in the store every so often. It was yellow, just a nice, warm yellow, like the comfort of the beams of the sun.  
He had taken it home that day along with a bottle of blue paint, to make it special.  
'S'.  
For 'Sturluson.' So no one would ever forget her, no matter what.  
His arms were wrapped around her waist, hands clutching ever so slightly at the cool, vinyl-like material of her cat suit. The wind was ruffling through his chestnut brown hair, laughing, loving, needing.  
This was all he ever wanted.  
To be with his person.  
His clothes snapped and whipped around him, she leaned forward and it seemed to back the bike go even faster.  
Faster than what seemed possible.  
Everything was blurring around him. The city, the people, the landscape.

It was just him and her, to take on the world.

**Leaving everything behind**

Oh, they'd shared so much life together!

Everything had been incredible.  
Nothing could have stopped the two of them.

They were so in love!

Embracing life and embracing each other.

But Shinra was now a few short of eighty years.  
Seventy two of those years, were spent within the accompaniment of this beautiful creature before him. He wasn't ready to go, he clung and clung and clung onto his life until he'd reached this point.  
Something within him, just told him that it was time; today, now.

He'd always seen death as a bandit, a thief come to steal away his world.  
Perhaps he was selfish, or just desperate.  
But he no longer could envision things in that sense anymore.  
He loved this woman with all of his heart.  
She brought him joy, brought him life.

But was he even truly living anymore?

No.  
He was not the strapping young man he used to be.

Even his memory was fading.  
Every morning he awoke and sat up in their bed, feeling more and more empty. Like he slowly was losing everything, even with her still sitting beside him.  
His memories were flitting away. He was sick.  
He was a doctor. Or, he had been.

He knew what it meant. What the symptoms were.  
And he knew eventually what would happen if he continued to let things go at this rate.  
He couldn't let this get out of his control.  
He knew that he had to make his decision before he lost the ability to.

He continued to tell her he was fine. That it was just because he was weary.  
But inside he knew that the young brunette twenty-something who'd loved her so dearly was dying.

**But even at our swiftest speed we couldn't break from the concrete**

He sat in that bed each morning trying to reach out and cling to the memories that were slipping from his grasp.

He always felt so hollow, and the hole only grew larger and larger with even each passing hour.  
It sucked everything he once had cherished into a void of nothing. Memories that should have been there only remained as wispy traces now. His heart ached.  
Things faded in and out of his consciousness.

Where were they back then?  
What was this taste in his mouth? Strawberries? Why was the sun so bright? Why was the expanse of something underneath him so soft...?  
He was laughing. She'd said something that triggered it, and it had spread. Her shoulders were shaking with a chuckle or two before it had spiraled into a fit of giggles neither one of them could control.

Why were they laughing anyway?  
Why couldn't he just remember...?

Why did he have to lose these precious moments?  
All he wanted was life with her!

He did not want to die! He didn't want any of this to end!  
Why did he have to lose the moments of his youth? When he had been at his finest and the bond of their love had felt strongest?

He didn't know.  
But he knew that it could not be helped.  
There was nothing he could do to stop what was happening to him.

He could no longer laugh without wheezing, hold her without quivering, love her without tiring.  
And although just catching sight of her within his waning vision made his weakened heart skip its beats, this was much like appreciating her through a pane of glass.

The object on the other side of that glass was so beautiful.  
But he really could only sit and stare for so long before it came time to move on to the next exhibit.

**In the city where we still reside.**

She laid his fragile figure down on the bed, and then laid down beside him, her slight frame dipping into the mattress just slightly. He smiled once more, and outreached for her hand.  
She clutched his fading, pale hands in her own, gently, but firmly enough to reassure.  
What was in a death?  
Dysfunction?  
Injury?  
At this point he was so aged... Long in the tooth. Perhaps he could just let go of his misgivings and pass.  
"Celty." He huffed, and she help up her cell phone in reply.  
[Yes?]  
"Thank you... for taking this much out of your time for me."  
Her words next were the paper wings in which he took flight upon...

[Nothing could have been more fulfilling.]

His eyes fell closed. For a moment, she thought she noticed his lips moving again, but no sound reached her.

**And I have learned that even landlocked lovers yearn for the sea-light navy men****  
****Cause now we say goodnight from our own separate sides...**

Whispers of her name were intertwined with his last breath.  
She took this from him.  
This was the proper time. He had told her so.  
It was time to give all of these last few laughs closure and close the curtains so the next play could be performed tomorrow.

The shadows wrapped around his neck and tightened. Swirling around, stroking his cheeks, reassuring the man before her that this was going to go over without trouble.  
This had been what they'd agreed on so many years ago.

He embraced her touch like she was loving that young surgeon once again.

She folded his delicate arms over his chest, trailing her fingertips over the surface of his riveted cheeks one last time before she to, felt the urge to move on.

**You may tire of me as our December sun is setting because I'm not who I used to be...**

The woman caught the swirl of air and slipped it into her pocket as she walked out of the home.

Everyone was gone now.  
She'd had a nice run with mortals this time.  
She met the most beautiful of people in this hideous city.

Individuals pure of heart and individuals struggling to find themselves.  
She'd learned so much from all of them.

She lived a whole other life, separate from the one fulfilled within her missing piece.

It was time to rejoin with herself.

Maybe another time, sometime in the future.  
These events would repeat itself.

She would met them.  
Live amongst them, learn from them and grow to love their company.

Everything cycles through and lives and dies.  
She wondered how many of these cycles she had already witnessed.

She wondered how many more she would experience.

**Brothers on a hotel bed...**


End file.
